Thursday, December 15, 2011

How to decide when to book your flight home...

 My flight home is on Tuesday, Dec 20th (8:15).  Picking this date was a somewhat random thing for me, as I had no idea how to even begin to decide which day to fly home.  Especially as I was booking both of my flights at the same time, in August.  So how do you decide, months before, which day would be the best day to fly home. 

I still don't know 100%, but I will share a couple of things that I've learned, particularly dealing with finals, the end of the semester, and the knowledge that I have about when everyone else is leaving.

Our last day of finals is tomorrow, Friday the 16th.  That date is given to us as the "you must be here for at least that long" day, and you are allowed to fly out any day after that.  I picked the 20th for a couple of reasons.  I figured that with the possibility of having a final on the 16th (which I do, by chance), there a) wouldn't be a lot of time to prepare for leaving before the final, and b) there would probably be a little bit of time for saying good bye to people that I'd met.

So my original fly back date was going to be Monday (the 19th), but I decided to push it back one more day, just incase I had things that would need to be done that could only be done on a weekday (such as possibly closing a bank account, or something).

Right now, as far as I can tell, this won't be necessary.  I don't seem to have anything that will need to be done on a weekday.  But how do you know beforehand, right?

It seems to me, based on when everyone else is leaving, that the best day to leave would either be Sunday the 18th (two days after the last final day), or Monday the 19th (three days after). 

My reasons for this are:
 - You still get time to say good-bye to whoever is still here
 - A lot of people are leaving or have already left to go on either last minute trips, or are starting "Christmas in Europe" types of trips.  So its not like everyone is here anyway.
 - Like I said, theres nothing that I really need to do on Monday that couldn't be done between Friday and Sunday, if that had been what was necessary.
 - By the time I leave, there will be pretty much nobody here.  I can't actually think of anyone (of my friends) that will be here on Monday.
 - Gives an extra day to get home, especially with Christmas being so close.
 - As most people are leaving the 18th/19th (as far as I can tell), its been very easy for them to find someone to share a taxi with to get to the airport  (sidenote: a taxi from the city centre to Glasgow Airport is listed as being around 20 pounds)

I know one or two days might not seem like a big deal, but when this last week has been dragging, it really makes me wish that my flight was even 24 hours earlier than it is.

Obviously don't just completely take my word for it and book to leave right after finals and get mad at me or something - I'm just adding my two cents, and my view from over here, in case anyone is looking for some sort of opinion to help in their decision making.  I know that if I had read ANYTHING that gave me SOME sort of clue as to what day to leave, I probably would have left a day earlier, at least. 

   (side, sidenote:  Accommodations contracts - at least for Cairncross House/University of Glasgow - go up until the 31st of December, so technically, you can stay that long.  Just putting that out there.  I know plenty of people that are technically "in" their rooms until the 31st, but are traveling around Europe, and just using their room as a place to keep most of their stuff)

And theres still time to vote in my poll - which of the places that I went to was your favorite?  Just a quick click is all it takes, and I'm really curious to know which one is your favorite (I know which one was mine... and I also know which one wasn't :-\  )

Also, I reuploaded my walk to school video at 2x speed instead of 4x speed, so hopefully that is a little better (its still bumpy but... you can only do so much)  You can find it here: Walk to School!

Only a few days left (and one more final :(  )
     See you soon!

No comments:

Post a Comment